


if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have one

by fivewhatfive



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-29
Updated: 2013-04-29
Packaged: 2017-12-09 22:56:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/778925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fivewhatfive/pseuds/fivewhatfive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the Dolorosa has an important job to do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have one

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Who Shot AR (akerwis)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/akerwis/gifts).



She braces herself on the counter of the nutritionblock--obsidian, now, it still hasn't ceased to give a sense of novelty to even a menial task such as slicing grubloaf--and breathes. Breathes in and envisions the deeper brooding caverns, the ones where not even soft-glowing fungi dare to pepper the walls, and one cannot tell from where a cool breeze could possibly be coming from. There was this pervasive myth among younger jadebloods that that was where they took the mother grub to die - or, conversely, servants who'd ceased to be of use. It's how she'd learned that not all inductees into their order were recruited the same, and why her smile was tentative when they came to her with such gossip. _Dolorosa, Dolorosa_ , they seemed to tut, as a group. _Would it pain her to laugh?_

If they only--

_RIBBIT._

Oh, that _does_ it.

In three long strides she catches up with Mimi, then Anya - Tor? Whatever the blue-streaked one is called. They squirm in her arms, slick and cool and stubborn, so terribly stubborn. Small wonder her grub has taken to them with such frightening single-mindedness.

"Out with you," Dolorosa says, and shoos both frogs out the door. Next she checks each adjoining block, areas where pillars, seats and even shelves have been carved right into the stone. To this day she cannot tell if the carpenter droid had been acting on her own subconscious desires, or simply working to accommodate a mother grub, or if that too bore the ugly signature of the hemocaste. Nevertheless, there was an elegance to stone carefully smoothed into shape, and she did so enjoy the unobtrusive canvas it offered for colorful fabrics.

She finds them in her respiteblock. Lozy and her grub, sitting under a desk and... goodness, he's almost too big to sit there without hunching over. She'll need to work on new garments soon.

Not for the first time, it occurs that this would've been an outrageously simpler job, had she been an actual lusus. Does a dragon lose its temper at finding its hive overrun by the ribbit-making contraband obstinately hoarded by its custodian? No, it merely eats well that day.

Meanwhile Dolorosa's nursing a throbbing thinkpan and her grub--

Her grub harasses Lozy and points at something between them. She cranes her neck and makes out red diamonds spread on a white background. Her grub is positively stabbing the card with his finger, now, his face growing pinched. He points at one diamond and looks up, staring at the indigo frog before him like something ought to happen next.

The skin beneath Lozy's mouth swells into a translucent bubble.

Her grub scowls.

He starts over, touching diamonds one at a time, only this time he says, "One." And then, "Two." 

Dolorosa doesn't know when her hand found its way to her lips, fingers pressing down lightly, but there they stay as she looks on from just beyond the doorway. She recognizes that. She's done it herself.

Her grub is trying to teach the frog how to count.

And once she realizes it, it just cannot be helped. She laughs. She laughs against the palm of her hand, and into her grub’s mop of black hair as she carries him to the recuperacoon, and as she descends the stairs back to the lower level.

\--

The setting sun calls for a ritual: each door must be locked and barred, the windows secured, curtains drawn. Once it is done, there is often a bothersome ache behind her shoulders; she likes to call it purpose. Tonight, however, the frogs croak under her windows as they hear her approach, and she cannot fight a secret smile. A whimsical day, no doubt.

Dolorosa switches the lights off and closes her eyes, counting three breaths before allowing her eyelids to flutter. It’s usually enough to reset her vision, now that the main source of light is the faint glow of her skin. Yes, such whimsy. She'd left many things behind at the dawn of a lifetime spent in the dark, yet it was the intangible she seemed to be constantly stumbling upon, unaware it had been lost, mourning it when found.

She pads into the kitchen, leaves the electric carving knife within reach--she has to admit that their beloved empress does have the occasional good idea--and sets the cookalizer to reheat yesterday’s burgundy sludge. She cannot, in good conscience, call it coffee. Let alone blood.

Outside the window, there is but a smudge of pink-orange-red along the horizon. Had her hive not been built out in the desert, she imagines twinkling lights would begin popping up here and there.

Alternia is waking.

She slides the glass panel shut and works the latch into place. In the dark, the window offers only a vague mirrored outline of her horns--one curving into a hook, neither notched--, of locks of hair she’s brushed into neatly sticking out, twin fangs cushioned against her lips. Rainbow drinker. Another frequent source of tittering among jadebloods.

The scent interrupts her reverie. Roasted beans are rather fragrant, she’s found. Her kitchen will smell bitter and strong for hours, and her bloodpusher will still skip a beat, as if she ought to act soon before something burns even further, but she’ll stay awake.

Dolorosa picks up the mug and

_jerks_ , once and then again, at the splash of hot bloodcoffee on the back of her hand. Her palms are sticky when she presses the switch and the room is flooded with light. No one. There's no one here. She heaves a stuttering sigh, and--and she takes the steps two at a time and does not truly breathe until she sees her grub softly snoring in the sopor slime.

"Silly," she says, one hand resting against the base of her neck. "This is quite silly." It suddenly registers that she's white-knuckling the electric knife in her other hand. She'd discarded her entire strife deck after discovering the tracking code embedded in it--another of their beloved empress' more clever moments--but carrying weapons the old way gets the job done all the same.

Only there isn't a job to do. No one is here, and her unwarranted fit has gotten the sleeves of her dress soaked and sticky. 

She sighs and heads to the wardrobifier.

\--

She does not sleep nearly enough for a troll of her age, daywalking notwithstanding. That much is not an unforeseen discovery, and neither is the fact that lack of rest has a similar effect to abstaining from sopor slime use. Sometimes the outline of assorted furniture will resemble a troll - the eyes see what they wish to see, it is no cause of alarm.

Therefore, it stands to reason that the frogs' incessant croaking does not have to mean anything. Perhaps if she goes outside and pleads with them, they may even listen.

"Dolorosa, Dolorosa," she mutters, as if some amount of self-chastising will make it all stop. She's checked the windows. There is no one out there.

Her grub sleeps through the agitation, as usual. He's often tired during the day, no doubt a side effect of something in his thinkpan going haywire at such brightness not translating into rest. She allows him naps, of course, and she could adapt to his sleep time, but it is safer for him during the day. It is a decision she made early on. He may sleep as he wishes when he is older.

Dolorosa gives a slight shake of the head. _When he is older._ She's actually raised a troll from grubhood to pupation and onwards. Now _there_ is an unforeseen thought that... stirs something within her chest. She frowns and begins smoothing the creases in her dress. There aren't many, but the gesture is soothing, something about the repetition and the sense that the world has narrowed down to soft, undulating red fabric. Even the frogs have gone silent.

"That is quite enough."

Dolorosa looks up sharply and _no_. No, it cannot be. How did she get- ?

"Child," says the other, to the question unspoken. "I was already here."

\--

Someone is at the the door. It is not an insistent knock, which Dolorosa appreciates mostly on grounds of good manners, but also due to a strong dislike of their kind's habit of assuming her hive is, in fact, a free haven for all that foolishly venture into the desert unprepared. She is not a poor hostess, naturally, but unannounced visitors of the peaceful variety may catch her hive in a state of disarray, or upset her lusus with their awe and probing.

The trolls at her door are not wanderers. They don jade fabric that has not suffered in the sand, and the cut - why, it's her turn to fight a desire to impolitely probe and gape. They are two, but the troll on the left, the one who is mostly wild hair and spindly fingers? This woman wears a shawl so sheer, so finely embroidered, it resembles the wings of Dolorosa's lusus. She wants to feel it between her fingers, examine the stitches and file that knowledge away for later use. 

"Oh," Dolorosa says, instead. Her ninth sweep had come and gone, all without a glimpse of another jadeblood. She'd begun to think the talk of servitude in caves was but a tale made up by other trolls to frighten the young and impressionable.

Little did they know, she has tended to the mother grub all her life.

As if summoned, her lusus flutters by with her mismatched wings. It draws the narrowed gaze of the troll elder, the skin around her eyes loose and wrinkled. "A virgin mother grub," she says. Dolorosa had expected a deep voice, perhaps a croak--her cheeks must be burning green right now--but the voice is clear and of a high register.

"Reverend Mother?" the troll accompanying her says, and Dolorosa blinks. She'd forgotten about that second guest altogether. She's younger, unassuming, and when the Reverend unfurls her fingers, she does not know what is coming.

Dolorosa hadn't known, either. ( _They are 612, and they know the secret of life. They run errands for the mother grub, monitor cave temperatures for an optimum offspring, monitor death rates so the army is plentiful. Everyone has an important job to do--_ )

The Reverend is deceptively agile for her age. When she snaps her companion's neck, the excitement that had been blooming in Dolorosa's chest plummets so abruptly into shock, she second-guesses both feelings. She second-guesses what is right before her eyes.

So she steps back. "No." She steps back and she locks the door. " _No_ ," she says, firmly, and walks to her sewingblock.

Her grub is there, forehead planted on a desk. He raises his head when she walks in, rubs that shaggy mess he does not let her touch unless he's truly upset, and says, "What?"

"Nothing."

\--

"Oh, honestly," she says and begins to fill in the letters. H-E-R and I and M and so forth until 39 Across, _She Of The Hellacious Mane_ , shimmers and vanishes from the list. She would not want anyone culled because of A Puzzle In Which An Arrangement Of Numbered Squares Is To Be Filled With Words Running Both Across And Down In Answer To Correspondingly Numbered Clues, and the ever-presence of Her Imperious Condescension among the answers is immutable fact, but that does not mean they can't make it challenging.

"Honestly is about right," her grub-- _Signless_ , he wants to be called Signless--says from across the table. Ever since the dreams started, the rings beneath his eyes have deepened, his temper shortened. She wishes she could make it stop.

She wishes he would let her try. 

"Fucking honestly!" he says, now, and sits up, almost _away_ from what he is reading.

"Signless," she chastises.

"No, look at this." He slides a binder across the table. Oh yes, the collected gems of his grubhood. She pushes her husktop aside and lets the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth bloom.

"You went through so many crayons," she says, fondly, fingering the wobbly lines covering the page. "Always gray. I could hardly keep up with the demand."

"But the _frogs_ ," Signless says, with the dramatic sort of exasperation only eight-sweeps-olds could convey. He flips pages and points at the drawings of his old ribbity friends.

"If I must say the truth, and in the present occasion I believe I may," she tells him, "I, for one, do not miss them."

"Look at the damn names. Anya, Lozy, fucking _Tula_?" He stares at her, so openly awestruck. "It's them, Rosa. It's fucking them." So openly _hopeful._

"But you were just a wiggler," she says. "I thought the dreams started-"

"Sooner than we thought, obviously." Signless's head drops to his hands, and he groans. "This is a stinking oozing sore, wrapped in a giant bag of hoofbeast shit."

"Signless!"

He waves it off, without lifting his head from his other hand. "Yeah, yeah, I'll scrub the bottom of the recuperacoon."

Her own hand hovers uselessly in the air, then drops gently to the table. He is much more skilled at shoosh-papping, and besides, he does not project anger or true suffering. She simply has to work harder at eradicating that foul vocabulary.

When Signless looks up again, his eyebrows are arched, and his cheek rests against his fist. "What are we going to do?"

"I do not know."

"I mean, I can't know all this and do nothing about it," he says. "There has to be a reason."

"Yes, I suppose."

He's glancing elsewhere, and she knows his thoughts have raced far ahead. They'll trip all over themselves before coming back, at which point he'll realize he'd made up his mind from the start. Dolorosa stares at his face, her handsome grub with his silly leggings and bright eyes, and wishes she could still tuck him up her sleeve, he'd been that small.

Dolorosa lowers her eyes to the fabric bunched at her lap, considers smoothing it. A jade-tinted droplet touches it first, leaving a dark circle in its wake.

She hears her grub sigh.

"That other world, the one in my dreams?" he says, quietly. "You wouldn't have had to hide. We wouldn't have to run."

She cannot bring herself to do much more than nod.

"And you could've been an Excruciverbalist instead of being annoyed by dumb puzzles that don't meet your standards," he adds. She lets out a laugh, shaking more droplets loose from where they'd gathered at the tip of her eyelashes.

There are footsteps, and then a thigh against hers, and then an arm around her shoulder, and then, "Shoosh." Signless rubs at her shoulders and draws her near. She is going to cry all over him; it's mortifying. "I have to do something," he says, and she chokes on tears and the exasperation of hearing what she already knows. As if he could ever sit back and cover his eyes. He hadn't given up on _gardening_ until she'd forcibly removed the rake from his hand for the sake of the purrtunias.

Dolorosa pulls herself together with a shuddering breath, running a finger under each eye and blinking away the blur. Signless does not return to his side of the table, nor does he scowl when she fusses with the collar of his hood. "I wish I could change your mind," she says, thumbing his collarbone. "I wish I could keep you here."

He squeezes her hand. "Everyone's got an important job to do, right?"

"Yes." Dolorosa pats their joined hands. Upright, he'll barely reach her shoulders, and yet his hand eclipses hers. "Everyone has an important job to do, my grub."

When she blinks, moisture trickles down her cheeks anew.

\--

Both moons are high in the sky when she steps outside, the air sharp and cool. Dolorosa tugs the scarf tighter around her neck, then walks. It does not take much. Barely ten steps before she senses another's presence, looks aside and finds the Reverend there. Open lands such as these tended to invite gusts of wind as seen on the oceanside at dusk; it is doing a number on the Reverend's hair, just as it used to make the shawl flutter about Dolorosa like the flimsy wings of an agitated mother grub. In fact, they’d once gotten caught in the prelude of a storm, and between swatting at the shawl and holding a screaming wiggler by the hood of his cloak, she had felt very much the part.

The Reverend is unperturbed, of course. Her hands remain tucked into the sagging sleeves of her dress, which many took as a sign of ease. Foolishness. After so many sweeps into her service, her tutelage, Dolorosa had seen her at ease only once, and it'd had nothing to do with witnessing six hundred other trolls scramble to do a job she wished she could've done herself.

She eyes Dolorosa's choice of attire, a short-sleeved dress and a scarf she pilfered from her grub, and quirks an eyebrow. Dolorosa chooses to ignore it. She will not suffer the shawl for this.

"I have considered your words and I do not have reason to believe you are lying." The Reverend bristles, so she carries on quickly, "Otherwise you would have snapped my neck the moment I turned away, and your reluctance to do so even now leads me to conclude you do in fact need me."

"So that means..." Dolorosa takes a deep breath. "That means it is true. They are all dead."

"Yes," is all the Reverend says, and then points a long claw at a spot beyond Dolorosa's shoulders. "Do you see it now?"

She does see. It's a dilapidated hive, razed to the ground by trolls who'd thought necessary to leave the Condesce's three-pronged insignia painted in pink glitter on the front door, though the door itself is splintered and propped up against one of the few surviving walls.

Inside, the counters will be obsidian.

\--

There have been caves beneath her hive for as long as she can remember. They weren't terribly deep, and if the path to the stairs was left unlocked, Dolorosa could hear the soft-buzzing of her lusus as they both went about their daily tasks. It is not common for a mother grub to take on a wiggler, but hers had never bred, probably due to the defect on her wings. 

Six days after she'd disappeared, Dolorosa had covered the entrance to the caves in black draperies and worked in silence.

(Two days later, she'd found him.)

The Reverend leads the way, mindful of the hem of her shawl as she mounts step after step. Would that they had parted on better terms, would that they could commiserate about the perils of displaying one's rank.

Instead, she'd run, and she'd run _fast_.

"I do not understand."

The Reverend hums low, which Dolorosa had always taken as a sign there was much screaming taking place within her thinkpan. The mother grub did not like loud noises, so one had to get creative about airing out frustrations.

"This place, I mean," Dolorosa clarifies.

"You understood it well enough to hide in a series of silly memories."

"So that _is_ what they were."

"Indeed." The Reverend braces one hand on the wall when the steps take a turn to the left. "There are Gods in the unfathomable beyond, child, and they've smiled upon our Empress."

Dolorosa purses her lips. "Ah." Three steps, and then it comes: this woman holds power over her no longer. She may speak freely. "Death has not changed you, Reverend."

The Reverend casts a glance over her shoulder. So much hair, and yet Dolorosa can perfectly make out that piercing jade stare. "Would that it had changed _you_."

It is not a very pleasant walk.

She begins counting steps, to empty her mind, but emptiness brings questions, and questions bring doubts. How could they all be dead? How long ago had that been? Whatever could they possibly need from her that the empire hadn't already taken?

"What now, child?"

Dolorosa blinks, and that seems to conjure up several steps between where she stands and where the Reverend is frowning. She hadn't realized she'd stopped moving.

"I wish to know what you want with me," she tells the Reverend. Something flutters in her stomach at such forwardness, which is ridiculous, but such was the nature of learned behaviors.

"I want you to stop asking questions and get down here."

Dolorosa crosses her arms. She cannot hear what the Reverend mutters, but she does see her lips move. Next time she speaks, there is an edge to her tone, but the words are clear.

"Walk with me. I'll explain on the way," she says, and starts walking no sooner than she is done speaking. That was probably what passed for a request, in her mind. A slight variation of tone.

Worst of all, there is a feeling at the edge of Dolorosa's awareness, and it sounds too much like understanding. She grimaces and swallows a sudden longing for Psionic, his toothy grin and high success rate at telling one to, quote unquote, snap the fuck out of it.

"I said get down here!"

Dolorosa starts, and she is in the process of gathering words to adequately--if not politely--express her outrage, when she catches a ripple out the corner of her eye. Right there on the walls, it's as if she's plunged her hand deep in a lake. She backtracks, which is not a terribly bright idea considering the stairs and the length of her shawl--

Oh, no.

The shawl is gone when she looks down, but there is something at her feet. It's the playing card. The eight of diamonds. Eight blue diamonds at her feet. They are dead and she is lost. All is lost. _Dolorosa, Dolorosa._

"Dolorosa!"

Someone yanks on her arm, a wild mane, that glowing blue eye...no, jade. Jade eyes, marred only by age. The Reverend is holding tight onto her wrist, which is the least surprising development considering she does not remember sitting down on the steps, nor donning her shawl again, and she is quite certain there were never fungi along the walls of her hive's cave.

"They were designed for the living," the Reverend says, and for once she sounds the same as when learning of a grub's failure to hatch, a delay in the Empress' war plans. "Any memory may take shape in these bubbles, and they may yet take the shape of a neighboring bubble." She releases Dolorosa's wrist, places a hand on her knee instead. "We are dead, child. Our fears speak louder."

"You should've left me with him."

"You would've realized it wasn't real," the Reverend says. "And you would've been alone when it happened."

Dolorosa swallows down salt and rubs angrily at her eyes. "So those are my choices? I go along with you or I stay here at the mercy of my own thoughts?" She stands up, dislodging the Reverend's hand and offering none of her own to help the Reverend rise. "Did they put him to the irons too, the one they said would come after mine?"

She almost believes the Reverend to be at a loss of words when her mouth lingers open, and then the barrage of words hits. "Did you not _listen_? Our world is gone. There was not and will never be another foolish wiggler to threaten it all over some unspeakable idea. You speak of our Empress as a monster, but your grub would've plunged our world into chaos." The Reverend goes for her wrist again, and succeeds only at grasping a bundle of fabric, promptly torn by her claws. "To hear you spout this much nonsense. You were to be my successor, child, and now look at you!"

Another ripple tears through the walls, soft and gold-tinged. Dolorosa does not turn--barely dares to breathe, lest it mean the return of the dice--and yet... and yet there is a flicker of recognition. A fond exasperation that could only mean one thing.

And because the Reverend sees it too, and is scowling, she does turn, just slightly. Just enough to glimpse twin extended middle fingers. As she does so, the memory shimmers and fades.

"Honestly, Dolorosa," says the Reverend, successfully deflated.

(Oh, that wonderful boy.)

"Honestly sounds about right," Dolorosa says in return, and inadvertently smiles. She breathes in the scent of overturned earth and touches the bright green dots on the walls. There'll be a breeding cavern right below them.

"It is evident we will not persuade one another to accept our personal beliefs," Dolorosa says. She looks the Reverend in the eye, and finds that her stomach has settled. "So in the interest of this mission, which you refuse to elaborate on and do not think I have not noticed, I suggest we avoid speaking of our respective grubs."

The Reverend holds her stare for a long time. It's fitting, for this is the one time Dolorosa actually wishes to hear her speak, wonders which part she will refute. 

Naturally, she simply decides to walk.

\--

"The Demoness came to me, just before the end," is the first thing she hears after much rustling of fabric. They are down to the proper caves, Dolorosa's own glow lighting the way, though the Reverend never ceases to walk ahead. She must know these caves like the grooves on the palm of her hands, or perhaps it is the fact that this seems to be a memory of her own doing.

"She said our race would fall," the Reverend says. "She said her master must not win."

"Her master?"

The Reverend shrugs. "This plan is of her doing, but it requires us both. I've since waited for our paths to cross in this afterlife. And then for you to disentangle from the web of memories of-" She bows her head, as if conceding a point. "Him."

Dolorosa smiles. "Very well."

The Reverend slows to a stop, looks up and then to the side. Dolorosa thinks to come near--discreetly, of course--and lend her glow, but then the Reverend nods, and tucks her hands back into her sleeves. "Your lusus lies slain at the end of this tunnel," she says. "You must retrieve the matriorb."

" _What_? How do you know-?"

"You must retrieve the matriorb and take a seat on a slab marked with a strange symbol," the Reverend continues, as if Dolorosa hasn't spoken. Of course the kind streak could not last forever. "There you will stay until the Demoness comes to meet you."

"I am sorry, you did not seem to hear me," Dolorosa says. "I said, _what_?"

The Reverend stabs her chest with a sharp claw. It pokes a hole into her dress, of course, and there is an alarming trend there that Dolorosa really does not enjoy. She wants to tell the Reverend as much, but the absurdity of the task she's just been given still rattles inside her thinkpan. None of her many known words seem to fit inside her mouth anymore.

And so a claw pokes at her chest again, still unpunished. "You have an important job to do," the Reverend says, "and you will do it because I've taught you well."

\--

It ends on a blackened slab of rock, cracked around the edges. The matriorb pulses on her lap, dripping wet and sticking to the fabric of her dress in every point where the spikes touch it. Dolorosa only sees the ripples once, for barely longer than the blink of an eye, but long enough to persuade her against attempting to conjure a memory of her husktop. She did still have a puzzle to complete.

She cannot empty her mind, and she cannot ponder what everything she's learned might mean to her grub's preachings--the thought he might have died in vain is what summoned the ripple to begin with.

She has a long list of _cannots_ , and so she counts them, and then the horn-shaped spikes of the matriorb, cracks on the black slab, stalactites on the cavern ceiling.

(There is no point in counting the holes in her dress, it'll simply make her mad.)

And then she hears a dull thud, loose rocks skittering along the ground like frightened beetles.

"YEAH SURE, THANKS A FUCKING LOT. HEY KARKAT, LET'S GO DOWN TO THE FUCKING CENTER OF FUCKING _FUCK_ WHERE YOU WON'T NEED A LIGHT OR ANYTHING. I'LL JUST WAIT HERE AND SCAVENGE THESE RUINS FOR SHITSTAINS WHILE YOU BREAK YOUR FUCKING NECK."

Oh dear gods.

**Author's Note:**

> Fucking dreambubbles, how do they work? Dearest AR, I hope you enjoy this. I never thought I would be essentially writing alien baby fic, but life is amazing that way. And my dearest beta unlikely-course, you are an angel Shirley Manson sent to rescue me.


End file.
